i am once again seeing all these posts going around fundamentally misunderstanding what an intrusive thought is and going like “all intrusive thoughts must be violent or ur faking!!!” or whatever and like. i am so tired of them. stop putting them on my dash.
an intrusive thought is an unwanted, involuntary thought. that’s it, that’s the only criteria. it is a normal occurrence. they can be about anything, but they are usually about things one would find upsetting, which includes violence and other things one finds morally wrong, but can also include things like the idea of doing something strange out of nowhere, like the much maligned “eat a leaf” intrusive thoughts. sometimes they can also just be unwelcome thoughts that don’t involve thinking about oneself participating in anything- for instance, “what if the house catches on fire.” studies have found that nearly all people experience intrusive thoughts, but people without a disorder aren’t particularly bothered by them.
what most people on tumblr are presumably referring to when talking about (and attempting to gatekeep) intrusive thoughts are the distressing intrusive thoughts that people with ocd, ptsd, and some other disorders experience.
the ONLY difference between disordered intrusive thoughts and normal intrusive thoughts is that the disordered ones are upsetting, frequent, and hard to get rid of. the content can still be of literally anything, as long as it is an intrusive thought, bothers the person having it, and is a recurring problem.
obviously, violence is a really common topic for these intrusive thoughts, because a lot of people find it upsetting. other common topics include sexual acts, hurting oneself, doing nonviolent hurtful things (like saying awful things to your friends), religious blasphemy for religious people, sudden thoughts about tragic events occurring, implausible fears that come out of nowhere, and so on. once again, though, these are not the only forms disordered intrusive thoughts CAN take- they’re just especially common ones. someone who’s scared of lizards may have intrusive thoughts about a lizard coming in their house. someone who’s got contamination fears might have intrusive thoughts about touching objects that may be dirty. etc.
why does this matter so much to me? well first of all it makes me really mad to see people posting misinformation all over the place, just in general. please learn to fact check. second of all, though, i have OCD, which was once debilitating but is now more at the level of “constant misery i can still function through,” thanks to various coping strategies - and this misinformation-fueled sanctimonious gatekeeping directly excludes and mocks some of my debilitating intrusive thoughts, which also makes them worse.
See, I have intrusive thoughts, a lot. This includes violent ones. But the violent ones don’t hold a candle to the ones about putting foreign objects in my mouth.
Uh oh, though, that category includes “eat a leaf!” guess it’s not Tumblr Approved, even though it causes me way more distress than any intrusive thought about violence to myself or others ever has! see though, the problem is that YOU might find the idea of eating a leaf funny, or quirky, or whatever. I find it upsetting beyond measure. This is because it sets off my contamination fears to a debilitating degree, it causes me to imagine a bad sensory input in detail which is almost as bad as actually experiencing it, if the leaf is toxic it could kill me, and it is something i could feasibly do if i lost control for just a second. and then, on top of the extreme distress it causes me, i must come online and see a bunch of fuckers who love to PRETEND that they care about people with ocd have a great big fun time pretending like it is a fake intrusive thought for liars and scoundrels and that people like me having it hurts them somehow - so on top of being personally horrifying, it now also has an “upsets people” component!
Neither those thoughts nor the violent ones are the worst ones I experience- I don’t like to put a name to the worst ones. There are also plenty of other miscellaneous less severe but still very upsetting ones that just aren’t relevant to this post.
TL;DR if i see one more “REAL intrusive thoughts are VIOLENT ONLY” post come across my dash board then i am going to start having some violent thoughts that are not intrusive.